Book Reviews NPR
'North Woods' is the story of a place and its inhabitants over centuries
Location, location, location. Daniel Mason's gorgeous fifth novel, North Woods, is the story of a place — a yellow house deep in the woods of western Massachusetts — and its motley succession of occupants, human and otherwise, who leave their mark on the property over the course of four centuries.
It all starts with a pair of young lovers who, "casting off their Puritan yokes...absconded to...their private Arcadia," Mason writes. "They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, threading deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs...Gone was England, gone the Colony."
We read about what became of the woman decades later in the anonymous letter of a "nightmaid," who reported that the "heathens" came "in great number," setting fire to the stockades and slaying her family and neighbors. Captured with her baby, the nightmaid writes about how she was taken to a log and stone house beneath a mountain and nursed back to health by an old woman with an iron crucifix around her neck and a cherished Bible — part of the pair of young lovers — who was a friend of the Indian who spared the nightmaid. When avenging British soldiers turn up, the old woman does what she can to protect her friends.
North Woods manages, impressively, to balance both the narrow and the long view, intimately focusing on the lives of each of the house's inhabitants, yet expansively encompassing American history, natural history, and the relentless march of time and the cycle of the seasons.
The novel is above all a tale of ephemerality and succession, of the way time accrues in layers, like sedimentary soil. Many of Mason's characters and creatures come to violent ends. They die by axe, by gunshot, by exposure, by heart attack and heartache, by car accident, by mountain lions known as catamounts. The forest, too, suffers, savagely cleared for grazing, lashed by winds, incinerated by wildfires. Beloved ash trees, beeches, chestnuts, elms, and hemlocks are blighted by various invasive fungi, insects, and other pathogens. The present is haunted by the past, both literally and figuratively."......
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/19/1200166912/book-review-daniel-mason-north-woods
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